


To All the Children of Hungry Ghosts

by cadmean



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Dubious Science, M/M, Minor Violence, Psychic Abilities, Telepathy, Undercover Missions, Worldbuilding, some background dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 08:51:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14849643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean
Summary: Y77-908: The first psyker is discovered.Y78-973: The High Court of Reille passes the Children Act, mandating psi-aptness tests for all under the age of ten.Y91-192: The Reillish Empire begins its first campaign against its neighbouring countries, swiftly annihilating any opposition.Y108-023: After almost two blood-filled decades, the empire shows no signs of relenting. Among the increasingly unhappy population, one common sentiment prevails: Reille needs to fall.And Gyre finds himself uniquely positioned to give things a hearty push.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



_part 1: flies on the sun_

 

++An archival datanet feed.

No sound.

Visuals are of the expected high quality, and the feed’s official nature is, as is customary for the period, denoted by the Reillish crest of the three-tailed Dawnbird superimposed over the feed in its lower left corner. The feed itself depicts what appear to be scenes from the southern front of the war against Kirreth.

A wide shot of two opposing sides of footsoldiers clashing, while the heavy las-artillery booms silently in the background. Smoke briefly obscures the scene, and when it clears, the blue-clad Reillish forces are seen badly diminished and retreating.

At the sight, a cheer goes up among the still standing Kirreth soldiers. Their shardsteel bodies glimmer briefly in the light of the setting sun.

The camera swings to follow the retreating Reillish forces, then swoops low to the ground where it waits for a beat. Just as smoke once more threatens to engulf the view a small, boot-clad foot steps in front of the camera and disperses it.

“For the glory of the empire!” A three-colored overlay proclaims. “Have your child evaluated for their suitability for the psi-program today.”

Another shot of the battlefield. Fade out as a single child lays waste to the opposing Kirreth army.++

 

* * *

 

The research compound loomed like a beast out of some far-flung primal memory. In and of itself the building wasn’t particularly intimidating in the physical sense, though it did paint an impressive picture with its several stories and the old-fashioned clock tower; rather it was the air of barely-subdued malevolence it seemed to exude that had Gyre’s teeth on edge the moment the car rolled within sight of the building.

“Impressive, isn’t it? Has that real old-time look about it,” the driver said, once more picking up the steady stream of mostly one-sided conversation he’d only briefly paused when the local contingent of guardcorps had come to inspect the vehicle. “Can’t believe it wasn’t torn down during the Expansion.”

Gyre shrugged, replied something noncommittal and continued to look out of the window.

When he had first seen pictures of the compound in his briefing notes, he’d had to take a moment to himself. The resemblance to the building he’d so come to loathe in his youth was uncanny, to the point where he’d had to remind himself that no, that burnt-out husk was still crumbling to ashes half the world away.

Now it barely fazed him, though. Instead, he was trying to match up the actual building ahead of him with maps and general layout plans he’d been given beforehand. From what he could see, it all seemed to line up fairly well – save for the old clock tower, which Shiver and the Captain both had told him was nothing more than a ruin.

 _Must serve some purpose in testing the weapon, then,_ Gyre now thought, _if they bothered to rebuild it._ The Reillish Empire was not, by and large, particularly into aesthetics unless they served an explicit purpose.

Before long the car came to a stop, its engine cycling from a low whirr to near silence as the driver shifted it into standby to get out and start unloading Gyre’s luggage. After another moment of hesitation Gyre exited the vehicle as well, breathing in the sharp air of an autumn morning. Leaves crunched beneath his feet as he walked up to the main entrance of the research facility – a heavy sheet-metal door emblazoned with the Reillish crest, entirely at odds with the rest of the building’s stonework exterior.

There was no two-way cam, as far as he could tell, or even a bell or a knocker, so Gyre took a moment to eye the crest’s winged outline while waiting for whatever security measures the place had to pick up on him and open the door. It did so after another moment of complete silence, at which point the heavy plate split in two along some seam in the middle and revealed a well-lit corridor behind it.

Gyre felt it just before he crossed the threshold and entered the research compound proper. Psykers. Even having expected it, the sudden shift from dead air to—he couldn’t describe it, had never been able to put words to the distinct feeling the air, the whole atmosphere of a room, really, took on when another psyker came within range of his own power. But it was unmistakable, and after having spent the last few days among blanks, the change was startling.

Under the guise of bending down to retie his shoe, he took a moment to try and categorize just what sorts of powers were awaiting him inside. Shiver’s intel had been regrettably lacking in this aspect, as ACEC kept a heavy lockdown on all psyker-related information. Now there was the strong, ozone-like feeling of telepathy, but he’d expected that from a government-run facility; a breeze-like wispiness that put him in mind of the telekines often found performing illegally on street corners; something else he couldn’t quite put a finger on, ephemeral and unfamiliar—and just at the edges of his awareness, the dark, ashen scent of a pyrokete.

Gyre froze as soon as he sensed it, fingers splayed over a fleck of dirt on his shoe.

Pyroketes were rare, he reminded himself, even among Garden-reared psykers. But that did not mean that they didn’t occur at all – and that one was here, now, was nothing more than chance rearing its ugly head.

Behind him Gyre heard the sounds of the driver talking to what must have been a guard, and with a quick shake of his head he pulled himself back up. The past was the past. No use in letting it distract him from his present mission.

“I’ll be going on ahead,” he called over his shoulder to the driver and, yes, a bulky figure that, despite the stripes on her uniform, was most definitely not part of the usual R&D contingent. They both waved him off and continued their conversation, though now in a much lower voice.

Gyre shrugged, and stepped over the threshold and into the research facility.

He half-expected the heavy door to close behind him as soon as he’d moved a bit into the hallway that lay beyond it; thankfully – regrettably? He wasn’t sure, at this point – it did not move even a breath and he continued onwards into the depths of the research compound.

After only a few more steps, he was brought to a halt by the rapid patter of soft-soled shoes on hard ground resounding from the far end of the hallway. Gyre crossed his arms over his chest. Waited.

A man rounded the corner at the end of hallways with such speed that he almost threatened to come hurtling at the opposite wall – he managed to catch himself, however, and slowed down far enough to be able to fully make the turn.

“Welcome!” the man shouted down the corridor in greeting, raising an arm to give Gyre a half-wave. He came towards Gyre with a jovial spring in his step, and the wide smile on his lips was either actually genuine or _very_ thoroughly practiced.

Almost as tall as Gyre himself was, though notably lankier; his white lab coat fluttered slightly behind him with the rapid speed of his approach. There was a pair of glasses nestled in his curled, vaguely blond hair, and what appeared to be another, obviously-smudged pair tucked into the front pocket of his coat – Gyre had to bite down a baffled little smirk at the sight.

“Verlaine,” the man introduced himself once he was close enough, and just like that Gyre’s half-formed smile pulled down into a frown. This was his target? “I’m the resident cat herder here.”

But there was a lean, hungry look to him, and when he offered a hand, his grip was firm and his eyes shone with something Gyre hesitated to put a name to.

“My name’s Gyre. The new research assistant. I’ve heard a lot about you, doctor; it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he offered with an idle, indulgent smile that he’d perfected in the mirror long ago.

Truth of the matter was that he had, in fact, heard a lot about Verlaine. Quite a bit of it was directly conflicting information, and with very few hard facts to back any of it up; what all of Gyre’s informants could agree on, however, was that even if the scientist had never quite achieved the label of conventional genius so many of his contemporaries lusted after, he was nevertheless a quick thinker and adept at adapting to situations on the fly. High Command had been passing him from institution to institution, and though he was currently with R&D, he’d done his fair share of time with the military as well.

Before he had gotten into range today Gyre had entertained the idea that perhaps Verlaine was a precognate, or even one of the very rare timeskippers. Now that Gyre had come close enough that he could taste what sorts of powers were housed within the people here, however, he could say for certain that neither applied.

It certainly made Verlaine’s achievements more impressive. It also made him a great deal more dangerous.

Verlaine was now regarding him with the same empty-eyed smile Gyre himself had put on. “Likewise, I’m sure,” he drawled, and before Gyre could answer, Verlaine spun on his heel and gestured for him to follow along. “Let’s introduce you to the rest of the team.”

Not having much else of a choice, and remembering Shiver’s words that he was going to have to stick around for a while, Gyre did so with a forced spring in his step. Verlaine led him down several hallways – pointing out various features of the research facility’s R&D-issued security system as they passed them – until eventually they arrived in a foyer-like area.

Cushioned chairs and several couches littered the floor in haphazard-looking constellations, and at the far end of the room Gyre spied what must have been a small bar of sorts. The light here had a dimmer, more washed-out feel to it than the fluorescent mess illuminating the corridors; and though Gyre was certain that the windows sitting above head height on the walls were fake, they nevertheless gave the room a more open feel.

Verlaine had come to a halt just past the doorway, and was now surveying the room with his hands stemmed into his hips and with a vaguely irritated expression on his face.

“They should be here,” he told Gyre after a long moment. “I told them to take the afternoon off, so that they wouldn’t be reeking of the lab when you met them. First impressions are an important thing, aren’t they?” And, mouth now quirking up into the barest hint of a smile, he winked at Gyre.

Gyre blinked at him. Then his brain caught up with the words, and he replied, “Naturally. I—“

“Yes, well, it’s going to be quite an impression when the first thing you see of them is me yelling at them,” Verlaine cut him off, the smile gone again just as quickly as it had appeared. Once more indicating for Gyre to follow along, he began a brisk-paced walk across the spacious room – dodging several sofas and oddly-placed chairs and leaving Gyre to only just avoid a collision with a particularly low table.

Before either of their shins could come to any too grievous harm, Verlaine came to an abrupt halt in front of an array of several high-backed chairs. He stood there for a breath, then half-turned to meet Gyre’s eyes and slowly brought a finger up to his lips.

“Well then,” he announced quite loudly. “I have no idea whatsoever where the rest of the team might be—“

“ _Welcome_!” A multi-voiced shout rose up at the same time as three figures jumped out from behind the chairs.

Something vaguely like confetti was thrown at Gyre as more cheering erupted. He stood there, blinking, unable to do much else but take it – he had been prepared for a lot of ways his first few hours at the research facility could go, but all the things he’d been expecting had included rather more stabbings and handcuffs.

Not that he was going to complain, of course.

Plastering a smile on his face, Gyre joined in the laughter that was now echoing throughout the large room and took the opportunity to get a better look at his new coworkers.

Two women, about equal in height though not in stature; the one on the left with piercing green eyes and the other, as far as Gyre could tell, still trying and failing to simply stay awake. The third in the group was a man, tall, well-muscled to the point Gyre could see the sharp contours of his muscles flex when he stuck out a hand towards him.

“I’m Farraih,” the man introduced himself. “It’s good to meet you and, as I’m sure you’ll be sick of hearing in just a bit, welcome to the facility.”

Gyre nodded and replied in kind.

The woman visibly trying to stay awake shook his hand next. “I’m Taye,” she said, “and you won’t believe how happy I am to have you here.” Her expressionless face spoke of exactly the opposite sentiment, but Gyre felt like she was entitled to that – as far as Shiver had been able to impress upon him in his briefing, the posting she had gotten him was not one any of the other researchers felt was necessary.

“Gyre. And I’m just as happy to be here,” he replied. Idly he wondered whether she would pick up on his tone but, seeing her already turn to her companion, he figured that she genuinely did not care in the slightest. Just as well.

The woman next to her gave him a slightly warmer smile. “I’m Avialle.”

“Avialle,” he echoed, and in that moment he could see in her eyes that she knew where this was going and that she was going to kill him if—he went for it with a big grin on his face. “Like the were-bird of the Kirreth marshes?”

The withering look she threw him was more than worthy of the beast she did indeed appear to be named after. “Charming,” she ground out. “Are you always this adept at making lasting first impressions?”

Gyre considered. With a mirthful shrug and a deliberately long look at her and Farraih, he answered, “I do my best.”

Avialle rolled her eyes and both Taye and Farraih were entirely unreadable, but Verlaine, Gyre noted, was fighting and failing to keep a smirk off of his face.

Gyre let the moment sit for a few breaths longer, than smiled warmly and made a go at damage control. “But, likewise. It’s good to meet you, and I promise you that that’ll have been the last terrible joke I make at least for today.”

Her smile returned at that.

The five of them exchanged meaningless pleasantries for a while longer, until both Taye and Avialle excused themselves. When they had gone, Verlaine let out a long sigh and turned to Farraih, who was standing next to Gyre and painstakingly telling him about the food being served in the facility. A look passed between them, and just for a moment Gyre thought he could smell ozone.

“Farraih, you’re not doing anything terribly important today, are you.” It wasn’t a question, the way Verlaine said it, but Farraih answered with a careful little nod. “You won’t mind showing Gyre around the facility, then, will you? I need to get back to calibrating the—settings.”

He wandered off without so much as waiting for a reply, leaving both Farraih and Gyre to stare after him.

After a beat Gyre turned his head to glance half-long at Farraih. “Is he always like that . . . ?”

“A man of many moods, is Verlaine,” Farraih said with a shrug. “But, come. I’ll show you around.”

 

* * *

 

Farraih proved to be an entertaining tour guide, which was just as well, since the actual things he was showing Gyre were nothing he hadn’t already seen in Shiver’s intel reports. There was the big common room-like area, which according to Farraih was more or less the center of social life, such as it was, at the research facility; branching off from it were several hallways that either led to storages or the researchers’ own rooms.

“Makes it easy to stagger back into bed after a good night of drinking,” Farraih told him with a wink. “Don’t let anyone from outside hear you say that, though. No, sir, we’re doing very serious research in here—or at least,” he added, seemingly almost as an afterthought, “Verlaine is. I support him as much as he lets me, but so far Taye and Avialle have been feeling superfluous. Don’t let anyone from outside hear you say anything like that, either!”

Farraih, Gyre quickly gathered as they made their way through several drab-looking little offices, was in equal parts callous as he was constantly aware that the empire could and would make him disappear if he spoke out against it too much. It was a curious mix, though not one that was particularly rare to find; the Raindrops, after all, thrived on those who held the empire in less respect than said empire thought they should. It was a short way from jokes to rejection to rebellion, if the Raindrops’ agents could get their hooks sunken in in time.

Perhaps Gyre could spirit away more than just one person, here.

He made an effort to keep up with Farraih’s idle chatter as they walked through the research facility; laughing genially at the appropriate moments and keeping a smile plastered on his face all throughout, and it was only when they made it through the mag-locked doors and into yet another terrible large room that his control slipped.

The ceiling of the room was high, to the point that Gyre was certain that it must have stretched from the ground floor, perhaps even a basement level, all the way right up under the roof of the old building the research facility was now located in. Various machinery that Gyre had a hard time identifying was placed seemingly randomly across the floor, and the walls were lined with the chrome curves of pipes and steel beams. It was impressive, is what it was, and Shiver’s briefing notes hadn’t at all been able to do it justice.

“Impressive, isn’t it? This is where we’ll be working most of the time,” Farraih explained. With a nod, he directed Gyre’s attention to another mag-locked door on the wall to their right, all but hidden behind a particularly menacing-looking piece of machine. “And past there is the Dome, where Verlaine will be hiding for most of the working day. I don’t think you have clearance for it on your badge yet,” Gyre shook his head, “but I’m fairly sure you’ll end up in there eventually. Verlaine likes to pretend he doesn’t need anyone to help him, but, well. The rest of us aren’t blind, and plus, there’s a reason you were hired.”

“Is it dangerous, what he’s doing?”

“As dangerous as using their power is for any psyker,” Farraih said, nodding quickly at Gyre’s unspoken question before continuing, “Yeah. The good doc’s not only terribly smart, he’s also a pyrokete—could probably incinerate the whole building, if he were so inclined.” A beat. “I mean, that’s what he’d like you to believe when he’s yelling at you, anyway. Best not to chance it, though, if you catch my drift.”

And oh, Gyre did. Better than Farraih perhaps realized. But he pushed the scent of ashes and the memory of the terrible crackling of burning stone down inside himself as far as he could, and said, “A pyrokete! He honestly didn’t strike me as the type.”

“Power goes where power wills,” Farraih said, ACEC’s propaganda, for once, startlingly appropriate.

“Fair enough,” Gyre replied, and gestured to Farraih that they could move on.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the tour they had somehow circled back to the common room where, to Gyre’s delight, the small bar now appeared to be fully stocked for its intended use. Avialle was already busy mixing something or other in a heavy-looking shaker while Taye slouched in one of the bar chairs in front of her; Verlaine, for his part, was all too happy to start chatting away at Gyre the moment he and Farraih walked within easy reach.

“You ready to join the rest of us big and important researchers here?” Farraih said with a laugh as he gestured for Gyre to pick a drink from a startlingly short list. “For the glory of the Reillish empire, and all that!”

Gyre laughed along and chose a drink and in his lap beneath the bartop, his hands were curled into tight fists.

 

* * *

 

Gyre remembered very little of that first night, come the next morning. When he woke up to the disturbing echo of the alarm bouncing off of the walls of his small room, the taste of the alcohol was still lingering on his tongue and his teeth felt as if someone had dipped them in shardsteel. His  head, however, was blessedly clear where he would have expected a pounding headache, and so it was with little more than a theatrical groan that he pushed himself out of bed and made to get dressed.

As he was striding down the corridors to where Farraih had told him the small mess hall was, he gave silent thanks to Shiver’s excellent work forging his personal files. He’d been more anxious yesterday than he’d have liked to admit, but now, with that always-treacherous first day over and done with, he felt as if he could handle this.

He’d have to, in any case; both Shiver and the Captain had taken great care to impress upon him that once he was inside the various security measures that protected the facility, he would be more or less on his own.

“Shiver’s set up as many barriers and failsafes on the communication lines as she can, of course,” the Captain had told him, the perpetually empty glass of water once more in their hands, “but there’s only so much even she can do. So, Gyre—“

And it was the way they always ended their mission briefings, so after a quick glance at each other both Shiver and Gyre had chorused together with them, “Don’t fuck it up.”

And he wouldn’t. He would not let Shiver and the Captain down, he wouldn’t be found out. He’d either get the weapon or neutralize it, and if at all possible, he’d do the same to Verlaine Yerth.

 

* * *

 

“They’re building something, out there,” the Captain had told Gyre as soon as the flimsy office door had closed behind him. The door was more a concession to the Captain’s immense appreciation of dramatic flourishes than anything else; here, at the very heart of the Raindrops’ headquarters, there was very little need for secrets. “I’ve had Shiver keep an eye on ACEC’s and the R&D department’s spendings, and the latter’s have shot up significantly in the last few months. Shiver managed to track it back to Yal Hirresh – she’s signed off on _all_ the expenses.”

Gyre considered. “Sounds like R&D is trying their hand at something big again, if she’s that deeply involved.”

“That’s what Shiver and I thought, too.” The Captain leafed through the documents on their desk, fingers a blur until finally settling on a dog-eared piece of paper and handing it to Gyre. “Here. Check out the location it’s all going to.”

“A research facility?”

“Yes. Led by Dr Verlaine Yerth, according to Shiver’s research. Only a bare handful of other researchers aside from him, none I’ve heard of before; plus a small security contingent stationed just outside of the actual facility.” The Captain pointed out the relevant data on the sheet Gyre was still holding. “This is the kind of opportunity we’re not going to get again anytime soon, Gyre.”

Still engrossed in the document, it took a moment for their words to sink in properly. When they did, Gyre couldn’t keep the grin from his face. “Two birds with one stone?”

“A weapon, and one of R&D’s top scientists. Take them for ourselves or destroy them—either way, we could do worse.” The Captain’s eyes gleamed when they reached out a hand to grasp Gyre by the shoulder, squeezing with enough force to be just the wrong side of comfortable. “They’ve only just started setting up the laboratories inside the building, and they’re still looking for an all-purpose assistant. Now normally, of course, those would be chosen by R&D, but Defense’s internal security measures are still shoddy after last month’s attack, intra-loophole, all that,” they waved their free hand around emphatically, “ _Point being_ : there now just so happens to be an approved application for the job with your name on it.”

“There’ll be psykers at the facility, then?”

“Can’t see why there wouldn’t be. Yerth is bound to be one, the way he keeps on popping up everywhere—and they wouldn’t send him without proper protection, in any case. So, yes.” The Captain took a step back, folding their arms over their chest now and finally looking exactly as fiercely, dangerously determined as all of Reille’s anti-propaganda posters tried to make them seem. “Will you do take on this job for the Raindrops, Gyre?”

And what sort of question was that, really? “Anything to bring down the empire.”

 

* * *

 

He settled into the daily routine easily, and by the end of the week it felt as if he’d been part of the research team for months rather than mere days.

There wasn’t all that much to actually do around the facility, to the point that Gyre began wondering why R&D had even been looking for another assistant in the first place. It was a sentiment shared by both Taye and Avialle, who, though being classified scientists, had an even worse time of it than Gyre did.

On more than one occasion he had walked in on Taye loudly complaining about how terribly inconsequential their work was in the grand scheme of things and that, really, R&D had four fantastic micro-renular scientists all holed up in the same building, and two of them were mostly shunted off to dingy offices to make sure that coolants were flowing where they should?

Gyre never said anything, but he did agree. It was curious – and somewhat suspicious and, late at night when only the red light of the alarm clock illuminated his room, slightly worrying – that of all the people in the building, it was only Verlaine and Farraih who seemed to have any idea as to what they were actually doing.

Oh, between the various cooling systems and water supplies he and the others were constantly being forced to reroute and overclock and the knowledge that Verlaine was the pyrokete he’d sensed, Gyre had a more than rudimentary idea of what was going on behind those mag-locked doors. But he’d have figured that the other scientists would have been included in building and testing the weapon the Captain had sent him here for – that they were instead being excluded made no sense whatsoever to Gyre.

He’d have to see if he could get some information out to Shiver – but for now, all he could do was focus on not rerouting the wrong fuel lines and get into the rest of the team’s good graces as quickly as possible.

Taye, he’d found, was prickly in the morning, and doubly so in the evening; Avialle, on the other hand, was usually in a good mood once she’d had her morning coffee. The two of them balanced each other out to an extent that Gyre found highly amusing, and even if they took care not to let it impact their working relationship, it was fairly evident from the way they interacted that they were personally involved. Opposites attracted even here, Gyre figured the first time he noticed them heading down to breakfast side by side, shoulders bumping.

Verlaine—Verlaine he’d really only had piecemeal interaction with, by virtue of the other man seemingly having a hand in just about all of the day-to-day organizational dealings of the facility, as well as most of the actual work on the weapon going on behind as-yet closed doors. Yet when Gyre passed him in the corridors Verlaine always had a smile and a happy little wave for him, and it was a frequent occurrence for Gyre to find himself winning a game of cards against Verlaine in the evenings. He was a terrible liar but a good loser, and his laugh proved to be infectious.

And then the last member of the team: Farraih. Despite having spent more or less most of his free time his company, Gyre had to admit that he was finding it surprisingly difficult to get a good read on the other man. Farraih smiled a lot, and he laughed even more, but aside from that, Gyre had found that he liked to keep his cards close to his chest and not reveal any more of his own opinions than he absolutely had to. Gyre could definitely appreciate that sort of close-lipped demeanor in a coworker, though, and if anything it made him even more appreciative of Farraih’s company.

He’d gotten lucky, he thought. This was certainly an easier assignment than that time Shiver had dragged him along to face down a rogue ACEC agent, or when the main headquarters at the time had come under siege—all he had to do now, of course, was figure out what exactly was being built in the cellar of the building.

How he was going to get it out, too.

 

* * *

 

On Gyre’s seventh full day at the research compound, he was awoken not by his alarm but a loud, bone-deep rumble that reverberated throughout the whole room and had his sleeping cot – thankfully mag-locked to the ground along with everything else in here – trembling violently. Had he not known better, he would have suspected this to be the work of one of the more adept earthshakers under ACEC’s employ.

Yet even now the air didn’t carry that slightly rancid taste of old, decaying soil, which meant that either they were experiencing an earthquake – unlikely, there were no fault lines nearby – or, a more sobering thought, that something was desperately wrong with the machinery they kept inside the facility.

Gyre all but jumped out of bed at that thought, quickly grabbing yesterday’s discarded jumpsuit and picking up the case of mag-locking tools Farraih had given him on his first day. The door of his room opened with a shouted command and he was sprinting down the corridors, making a beeline for the main machinery room.

The closer he got to it, however, the less noticeable the quaking ground became until, when the mag-locked doors finally rolled open in front of him, it had all but ceased. It was nevertheless with great caution that Gyre stepped across the threshold and into the large room, fingers twitching and ready to draw on the various psychic powers within his reach the moment he needed to.

But: where he had expected gloom and destruction, the room looked just as it always did. The various machines chugged away in a steady rhythm to do whatever it was they were doing, there were no ominous holes in the ceiling and the ground hadn’t opened up to swallow anything, either. At the back of the room, however, near where the door leading to the facility’s inner workings was, Gyre could just barely make out Verlaine. His blonde hair was disheveled and he had one arm wrapped tight around his midriff; as Gyre watched, he took an unsteady step backwards and slumped against the wall.

He was just about to step forward to see what was going on when out of the darkened corners of his vision Farraih appeared, shaking his head.

“Leave him,” Farraih said. “Go back to bed.”

“What—“

“It happens. Nothing terribly unusual,” Farraih added with emphasis and Gyre, unwilling to fight the point, retreated.

On his way back to his room, he saw that the light was still on in Avialle’s quarters, and as he walked past the firmly shut door, he thought he could hear her and Taye urgently debating something.

 

* * *

 

He dreamed of the Garden that night, and of the fire, and, eventually, inevitably, of the charred corpses.

All of them had Verlaine’s face.

 

* * *

 

The dream jarred him so much that the next evening found him knocking on the door to Verlaine’s private quarters. Gyre’d not seen him all day – not unusual, that, but coupled with his experience the night before he was unwilling to just let it go. If the Captain had been there, he’d have explained it away to them with how he was supposed to potentially get Verlaine on the Raindrops’ side, wasn’t he, and what better way to do that then to express concern for his wellbeing?

As the Captain was half the country away, however, Gyre had to engage in no such self-deception, and was able to let out a sigh of relief when Verlaine finally opened the door.

“Evening,” he greeted the somewhat perplexed-looking Verlaine.

“Gyre—Good evening? Is there something I can do for you?”

“Just wanted to check in on you. I didn’t see you around all day, and then you weren’t at dinner – Avialle said I should bring you some food,” he lied, and held out the wrapped sandwiches to Verlaine.

He took them with a raised eyebrow. Seemingly weighing his options, Verlaine replied after a moment, “Thank you. Do you want to come in?”

Gyre found that yes, indeed he did.

Verlaine’s quarters looked almost exactly like his own, except that they were slightly larger and a good deal more cluttered with various stacks of haphazardly piled papers, pens, as well as several datapads. There was a slim table – similarly cluttered – and a bench-like seat in front of it, which Verlaine was now hastily clearing.

“Do sit down! I didn’t, ah, expect anyone in here, which is why it looks like—well.” He chuckled, and Gyre, reminded of the Captain’s own disposition towards precariously balanced piles of paper, laughed in kind.

“Like I said, I wanted to check up on how you were doing,” Gyre said. He dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper as he continued, “I saw you last night. In the machinery room. Seriously, Verlaine. Are you alright?”

Verlaine’s face, surprisingly enough, lit up at that. “Oh, I didn’t think anybody—I’m happy you cared enough to check up on me,” he amended, nervously pushing his glasses back up into his hair and smiling somewhat sheepishly, “but I’m fine, really.”

“I’m glad to hear that, then.” Choosing to abandon that particular line of enquiry, Gyre instead pulled out the bottle he’d taken from the common room’s bar. “Avialle also gave me this.”

“Did she?” But Verlaine nevertheless started rummaging around for glasses, setting them down on a low table without any care for the papers he was dislodging.

Gyre poured liberally. “No, of course she didn’t. I just wanted an excuse to stay a bit longer.”

They clinked their glasses together, and between Verlaine’s anecdotes of all the terrible researchers he’d met in his time and Gyre’s only vaguely truthful tales about the strange lab jobs he’d worked in his past, they ended up passing the time quite nicely.

When Gyre made ready to leave and began to say his goodbyes, Verlaine leaned over and laid a warm hand on his shoulder.

“Gyre, really. Thanks for checking in on me. I appreciate it.”

And if his touch lingered a bit longer than it should have, and if his cheeks were a bit more flushed than the bit of drink should have made them – well, Gyre wasn’t going to complain.

 

* * *

 

On his ninth day of working at the research facility, during breakfast, the datafeed screen was turned on when Gyre arrived. The rest of the team were sitting crowded around the table directly beneath it, all of them in turns staring up at the feed and spooning their morning meal into their mouths with as little splatter as possible.

Avialle, noticing Gyre still standing in the doorway, gestured for him to come over. “Something going on in the capital,” she told him, while Taye at her side nodded along for a moment before focusing back on her food, “They’ve put the station on high alert. Farraih says the guardcorps around the place have been doubled, and we’re supposed to keep the machinery offline until the lockdown’s been lifted.”

Gyre heated up his bowl of morning gruel and eyed the datafeed screen with studied indifference. The screen displayed several rapidly-shifting visuals of the capital city: in one a barricade of obviously fake shardsteel had been constructed right in the middle of the Plaza of Dry Triumph, in another, protesters of all ages were running past hastily-scrawled Raindrop emblems while chased by what could only be ACEC forces.

“Another attempted coup by the Raindrops, then?” he asked, more for appearance’s sake than anything else.

The Captain and Shiver operated on the principle that what you didn’t know would have a difficult time dooming the rest of the resistance movement, and so Gyre could not say with confidence that just because he hadn’t been informed of any attempt on the capital city there wasn’t one happening at all.

But it would make little sense to stage it in the capital in the first place. The Captain had always made a point to explain that the empire’s seat of power would be the last thing they would need to conquer – sway the minds of the people, turn them against the empire and their abhorrent wars with the rest of the world, and there would be more than enough support from the general populace to take the capital with as little bloodshed as possible.

Not that it stopped splinter groups from trying, of course. Lurk and Tumbles had both run their groups into the ground trying to breach High Command’s defenses, and while Venom had arguably come the closest to succeeding, even she had ultimately failed. Whirlwind, meanwhile, was notorious for their casual disregard of Shiver and the Captain’s orders, and though they led the rural campaign of the Raindrops with impressive efficiency, it was common knowledge among the resistance’s higher-ups that they were only waiting for the most opportune moment to try their hand at the capital.

This wasn’t what anyone would call an opportune time, however, and so Gyre turned his head and watched the datafeed more closely.

It was Verlaine who, after another moment of everyone silently watching the datafeed, indulged him. “The Raindrops wouldn’t dare. High Command is still on the edge after the skirmish with Saldethin two weeks ago; the Raindrops must know just as well as anyone that any disturbance, however minor, will be met with terrible retribution.”

A fair assessment, Gyre thought, and exactly why he was beginning to suspect that the people in the feed being shot down by conveniently low-powered las-rifles were all being paid very handsomely by High Command themselves.

He finished his breakfast quickly, but chose to linger with the others and make vague, noncommittal commentary along with them while they watched the datafeed. Verlaine ended up sitting next to him, and though he was soon engrossed in a stack of documents rather than the datafeed, he kept on leaning closer and closer to Gyre. Gyre let him, going so far as to give Verlaine a brief but warm smile when their elbows bumped together.

Around midday, the unrest in the capital had ceased or had at least been deemed to be of a now-manageable level, and the facility went back to business as usual.

 

* * *

 

And on Gyre’s twelfth day at the research compound, disaster struck.

For once all five of them were in the main machine room together. Something had broken inside the delicate interior workings of one of the largest machines – Avialle had tried to explain to him exactly what had gone wrong and why, but Gyre had been able to do little more but nod along and pretend that he understood what she was telling him. He’d never fancied himself a genius, of course, but over the last handful of days it had become painfully apparent how vastly the rest of the group outclassed him when it came to scientific knowledge.

But, completely understanding it or not: something delicate had twisted in a way it definitely shouldn’t have, and now the whole facility had been forced to come to a standstill while they all tried to find a way to fix the problem.

While Taye, Avialle, and Gyre were busy deep-cleaning several other moving parts they’d found that looked as if they could be next in line to cause a disaster, Verlaine and Farraih were handling the actual repairs.

“I know what’s supposed to be going on inside these machines,” Verlaine had told them, “do you? No? Then just let me handle it.” Gyre had had the distinct impression that the comment had been directed towards Farraih as well, but the other man hadn’t reacted to it in the slightest, instead trailing after Verlaine to begin opening up the largest machine.

It had taken all of them the better part of the morning to open up the machinery, and though Farraih and Verlaine now seemed to alternate sticking their upper bodies into the opening they had created in the malfunctioning one, it didn’t appear as if they were actually getting anywhere with it. But still they all carried on working – Gyre privately hoping that the machinery would somehow just manage to fix itself – and in between gossip about the current problems the capital and its secondary cities were facing and grumbling about how there couldn’t possibly be this many gummed-up pieces of machinery in all the world, let alone here, time passed in the quick-slow way time was wont to.

Then Farraih’s startled shout broke the low, comfortable din of conversation interspersed with music from the datafeed.

Gyre dropped the rag he was holding, whipping his head up to see what was going on—

Farraih, up on top of the large faulty machine, a magnetizer clutched in one hand.

Verlaine, one arm deep in the innards of the machine and looking worse for wear but determined.

And, terribly, shockingly: the large propane tank that Farraih must have been moving with the magnetizer, still suspended in midair in the space between Farraih and Verlaine but teetering as if—

It slipped the magnetizer’s hold completely.

There was a terribly long moment during which Gyre could clearly see his future branching off into two distinct paths. In one, he did nothing: the tank would fall, Verlaine would not be able to move out of its path in time, and that would be the end of any weapon development happening here for the foreseeable future. And the other path, just as clear: he made use of his powers, saved Verlaine, and had to bank on not having blown his cover to protect a Reillish scientist.

Gyre knew full well what Shiver and the Captain would have done in his place.

He took a deep, deep breath.

The Garden had tried to beat telepathy into him, when he had been younger and calling himself another name entirely, and they had failed time and time again. When he was with the Garden scientists, he could not invade their thoughts like Clover and Rinne and all the others were able to; but always later, when they had released him back into the dormitory, he would recount his daily experiences to his friends without having to utter a single word out loud.

Eventually, the scientists gave his strange brand of psychic powers a name. It had a very long, nonsensical designation in all the research papers, of course, but when they showed him off to the overseeing government officials, they dubbed him “a mirror”.

While he had no specific innate psychic ability, he wasn’t a blank like most of the rest of the population, either – no, what Gyre had was something else altogether. In the right environment – and through trial and error they had narrowed it down to him being within a hundred and thirty-five lenghts, roughly, of a psyker – he could tap into the powers of those surrounding him.

Say, for example, a telekine’s natural propensity for taking hold of items and stopping them from falling on top of things they really had no business falling on.

One arm outstretched to focus himself, Gyre took hold of the telekine’s ability and pulled it into himself, shaping it as he needed and amplifying its natural power like he’d been taught to do by the Garden scientists. Then, with a clenching of his fingers, he grabbed the propane tank as it fell and _held_ it.

It was a heavy thing, and unwieldy, too; worse, Gyre hadn’t had the opportunity to practice with any telekines, lately. His hold on the tank was clumsy and tenuous at best, but even so he managed to hold on for those long few seconds necessary for Verlaine to completely roll out from under it – and then it was only when Taye had dragged him up to his feet and well away from the danger that Gyre relaxed and let go of the tank.

It crashed down onto the floor with a heavy _thunk_. Metal dented, floorplates buckled, and where the tank had listed somewhat to the side and hit the wall, a metal pipe broke.

And Verlaine did not get crushed.

There was a moment of complete, utter silence following the crash. It seemed as if time stood still, for those few breaths, and it was only when Farraih shouted, “Verlaine!” and jumped down from the machine that reality righted itself and time flowed on.

Trying not to draw too much attention to himself, Gyre cast an anxious glance around to see whether anyone was reacting strangely – had anyone seen him use telekinesis?

But, no: Farraih was too focused on Verlaine, Verlaine was busy regaining some color in his bloodless face, Taye was kneeling next to him and still had a white-knuckled grip on his forearm, and Avialle – she met his eyes after only a second, but her expression didn’t betray any of the shock Gyre would have expected to see there if she’d noticed his use of a psychic power he should most definitely not have.

He let out a small sigh of relief and, with his legs no longer feeling quite as boneless, he too hurried over to Verlaine.

 

* * *

 

“Got lucky there, didn’t he,” Taye mused once the three of them were back in the common area, sprawled over various sofas and each of them nursing a tragically non-alcoholic drink. “If the tank hadn’t hit that pipe on the way down, it’d have crushed him.”

Gyre narrowed his eyes at her, watching for any sign that she’d seen more than she should’ve. When nothing immediately jumped out at him, he shrugged and said, “Missed him by about a second,” and then, because offense tended to be the best defense, “I’d have expected Farraih to catch it, but he must’ve not had enough time to react.”

The two women stilled at his comment.

“What makes you say that?” Avialle asked after a moment.

Putting on his best air of nonchalance, Gyre shrugged. “He was holding that big magnetizer, wasn’t he? You’re right, though, there probably wasn’t enough time to amplify the power going into it, mind you – he might’ve been able to divert its trajectory if he’d been fast enough.” A sip from his drink while he tried to hide his reaction to the two of them visibly relaxing at his explanation. “Ah, well, we got lucky with that pipe, so it’s no use discussing.”

Taye chuckled, and leaned over to clink her glass together with Avialle’s. “Yeah, well, with all that’s been happening with the prototype, Verlaine was all but due a lucky break.”

All three of them drank to that.

Gyre continued to watch them closely as the conversation turned around to more mundane matters, but neither Avialle nor Taye let on anything else about his hinted suggestion. He wasn’t sure what to make of that, if he were being perfectly honest, though he saw a handful of possible explanations. One of the two women may have been the telekine he’d been sensing, of course, but then neither had shown any particular inclinations toward the power; Farraih possessing telekinetic powers might have been a secret among the researchers for whatever reason and Gyre, as a recently-arrived outsider, might not be trusted enough to let in on the secret; Farraih possessing telekinetic powers may have been an actual secret, with no one knowing.

It was this last option that Gyre found himself favoring as he got ready for bed, though he was hesitant to put his reasoning for it into words. Perhaps he simply liked the idea of another unsanctioned psyker hiding here – Shiver hadn’t told him that there were any other Raindrops working undercover at the research compound, but she hadn’t told him that there _wasn’t_ anyone else there, either. Parceling out information was very much her thing, as he’d had cause to learn on several occasions.

In any case, it was something that Gyre would have to figure out tomorrow, his eyes heavy with exhaustion and his head swimming slightly as he waved a hand over the light to turn it off.

Darkness engulfed him for a blessed moment.

[So,] a foreign thought forced its way into his head between one breath and the next, [what brings an unsanctioned psyker into one of the country’s top research facilities?]

Gyre breathed in.

Gyre breathed out.

And when his heart was no longer threatening to break out of his chest, he replied, [What makes you think I’m a usanc?]

There was a long pause during which his thoughts were entirely uninterrupted. Gyre could easily guess what that was about: he’d not only used the term ACEC used to internally refer to independent psykers; no, what must really be throwing the other was that he’d replied at all. Telepaths were rare, outside of ACEC – not unheard of, of course, but between that and the proper lingo Gyre knew that he made for a fairly convincing undercover ACEC agent.

Finally: [Aren’t you, now.]

[I’m here, aren’t I? For what it’s worth, I wasn’t briefed that there would be another ACEC agent here, either.] Which was entirely truthful, at least for the latter part. Gyre had feared that there might be a proper ACEC contingent at the facility, but he hadn’t known for sure – ACEC liked to play their cards jealously close to their chest, to the point that rivalling factions within the organization often weren’t told what the others were doing unless it was absolutely vital. Now that Gyre knew that one of their agents was hiding among the researchers, though, he might as well try and make the most of it. [What’s your assignment here?]

There was a short, deliberately-articulated laugh that spoke of the sender’s sharply-honed telepathic ability more than any genuine amusement. [Let me get back to you on that once I’ve checked with High Command that you’re not a fucking Raindrop, alright?]

Well, shit.

[High Command won’t tell you, unless you somehow manage to get through to Yal Kiven himself,] Gyre shot back, [but you do what you think you must.]

[Nice try. We’ll see.]

And with that, Gyre’s thoughts were his own once more.


	2. Chapter 2

_part 2: footsteps leading through the ashes_

 

++A newscast datanet feed.

Scenes from the recent revolts in the secondary cities are playing on loop in the background. Present throughout all of them is blood, destruction, and the growing mass of guardcorps.

The longest-running clip is of a group of youths clustering around a makeshift flag bearing a haphazard likeness of the emblem of the Raindrops. They switch between chanting parts of the old speeches of Floodsinger Hain, and demanding freedom for the children imprisoned against their will at the Gardens.

One of the group, appearing to be no older than twelve, wags their finger at an approaching figure clad in ACEC colors; a localized storm briefly engulfs the ACEC agent before, with a roll of the agent’s shoulders, it quickly dissipates.

At the sight the group of youths scatters. They take their flag made of rags with them.

Over it all, the constant, similarly-looped reassurance of the newscaster that between the mobilized guardcorps and a specially-deputized squad of ACEC agents, peace returning to the cities is only a matter of time.++

 

* * *

 

Shiver first found him, fittingly enough, on what had been the coldest day of the year so far. Usually Gyre managed to get through the terrible winters that so plagued Reille’s capital city fairly well – there was always some job or other to be had, and though accommodation for unregistered citizens like him was both difficult and not all that rarely dangerous to come by, the Garden had trained Gyre well. He knew how to handle himself, and had little scruples when it came to working the seedy underbelly of the city.

That year, however, had been a bad one. War with Covenish to the east, and the additional taxes leveraged to fund it, had taken what little goodwill the common folk might have had and though crime flourished in much the same manner as it always did – a weed, once it sinks its root into the earth, is after all very difficult to eradicate – even they had grown weary of outsiders.

When Shiver approached him, Gyre was huddling on a bench under the ragged remains of a blanket and trying to formulate a plan as to how to best rob the bakery across the street. He didn’t see her approach until she was almost directly in front of him—a testament to the state he was in, for as soon as his attention focused on the slim, scarf-smothered figure the tell-tale feeling of a nearby psyker almost overwhelmed him.

“You look like you’re in need of some good hot food, friend,” she’d begun, and Gyre, always a master of succinct responses, had replied, “Fuck off.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. Seemingly considering her options, she stood in front of him for a moment longer before sitting down next to him – she kept her silence, though, and as Gyre grew accustomed to the intensity of the seawater-scent her power brought with it, he couldn’t help but ask, “You’re ACEC, then?”

And she’d laughed. “Quite the opposite. Tell you what: Give me an hour of your time, and I’ll see to it that you’ll have enough money to last you through the winter.”

They had talked back and forth a bit longer, but, inevitably, he had been forced to accept. And to his surprise the woman had taken him to a café, and they’d talked about nothing of consequence, and when the hour was up she had given him a plain paychip emblazoned with a single raindrop and begun to make her way back outside.

Gyre had stood there for a moment. Weighed his options.

He’d run after her.

 

* * *

 

Morning came, and with it the quiet realization that he was well and truly fucked.

Gyre woke with an anxious feeling fluttering around in his gut long before his alarm was set to go off. He laid in his bed, all bundled up in the blankets he’d piled onto it, and fought the desperate urge to not scream out loud.

He’d been at the facility for all of twelve days, and already an ACEC agent had found him. If only he hadn’t come here. If only he hadn’t decided to use his power to save Verlaine. If only—

But it was useless to worry about what could have been, of course. Even timeskippers couldn’t go back as far as he’d need to undo his mistake.

Briefly he thought about contacting Shiver, and telling her that the whole plan had gone up into luckily still metaphorical flames barely two weeks into things. But he could imagine the disappointed expression on her face, and knew that it would be a mirror to the Captain’s own disappointment – and despite any misgivings he might have had in the early stages of their acquaintance, Gyre was now fully committed to their cause.

Reille needed to fall. That much had been evident to Gyre the moment he’d escaped his Garden and made it to civilization proper, but now, after having worked for the Raindrops for a good decade, it was more than just a simple need for revenge that drove him. The government was corrupt, and though the newscast datafeeds kept on harping on about how much better the empire’s citizens were doing compared to the rest of the world, the Captain had been right when they’d said that that was only because their empire was built on the bones of their neighboring countries. Kirreth was a wasteland, and both Covenish and Naldar had been integrated into Reille with such brutal efficiency that little of their original cultures remained.

Reille, Gyre repeated to himself, needed to fall.

And this mission – finding out what sort of weapon Reille was building, and, perhaps, spiriting away one of the empire’s top researchers for the Raindrops’ own cause – would prove a decisive move in the constant tug of war with the empire the Raindrops were engaged in.

Gyre scrubbed his hands through his hair – too long, in desperate need of a cut – and, with some effort, calmed himself.

This was why the Captain had sent him, rather than one of Shiver’s more tech-inclined agents. He could deal with the ACEC agent – at least until they contacted their superiors and reinforcements arrived.

 _He could deal with them_ —if he knew who exactly the operative was. Even here, in the relative isolation of the research facility, it would be easy enough to stage a disappearance or an unlucky accident – Verlaine himself had almost fallen victim to one, after all.

Who was the undercover ACEC agent who had contacted him, then?

Taye and Avialle he dismissed almost as soon as he’d considered them. While he was fairly certain that one of them had to be a psyker, Taye was too prickly and would never have gotten through the initial round of training for ACEC candidates; while Avialle simply didn’t strike him as the type. ACEC demanded a certain brand of ruthless submission from their anti-psyker operatives, and she didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d follow orders the way ACEC agents were expected to.

Verlaine, on the other hand, was a pyrokete.

In all his life, and in all his dealings with usancs, Gyre had never once come across a natural-born pyrokete: it stood to reason, therefore, that Verlaine was a Garden-reared psyker who’d forcibly had his pyrokinesis twinned with telepathy. If the twinning had taken – and it had to have, given how the ozone-like scent of it permeated all corners of the building – then he would have been prime ACEC material.

There was no other explanation. Verlaine was ACEC.

Verlaine, his target, the researcher working on the mystery weapon, _the man_ _whom he’d saved_ —was ACEC.

Now Gyre really did punch the wall in frustration.

The pain tempered his anger just long enough for Gyre to consider the other possibility – that perhaps it wasn’t Verlaine who was the ACEC agent, after all. There had certainly been a lot of things happening at once yesterday in the machine room, and Verlaine had been at the center of them. Could he have had enough wherewithal to realize that it was Gyre who’d tapped into the telekinesis?

He curled his hand into a fist again. Only when the pain in his knuckles became sharp and bright did he relax it once more.

So perhaps not Verlaine, after all. Who then? Farraih?

Just as likely, that, if Gyre’s hunch that he was a telekine was correct. It would make sense for him to have noticed what had happened in the machine room; Taye and Avialle might not have recognized the brief use of telekinesis on the tank for what it was, but a Garden-reared, ACEC-trained telekine? There was no way he’d have missed the few seconds the tank had been suspended in midair.

Farraih, then. Farraih or Verlaine. One of them was his direct opposite in the research facility. An ACEC agent, presumably sent to keep an eye on the weapon and stop any outside interference. A pyrokete or a telekine, both presumably twinned with Garden-issue telepathy one way or the other.

Gyre breathed out.

Fair. He’d expected to run into an ACEC operative eventually – what Gyre really needed to know, now, was how good a telepath he was.

Shiver was watching the building’s incoming and outgoing communications, he knew, and she’d be able to take care of any alerts sent out that way before they could reach anyone and become a problem. But ACEC, Gyre knew, had their own communication channels that depended little on anything quite as interceptable as technology – but unless there was an ACEC comms office just outside the facility’s borders, a normal telepath would have a hard time of getting an intelligible signal out to anyone.

Then again, even Shiver tapping into outgoing communications would only hold for so long, and only for non-vital communiqués.

Gyre, therefore, was living on borrowed time until the ACEC agent – Verlaine or Farraih, he corrected himself – escalated message priorities to get an answer from High Command.

“Very well,” Gyre breathed.

Convincing Verlaine to join up with the Raindrops had just gotten considerably more difficult with the chance that the man was ACEC, but Gyre could still get the weapon he was working on in the depths of the research facility. Take it or destroy it, the Captain had said, and Gyre was very much planning on pulling through on at least this half of his mission.

 

* * *

 

“The thing about ACEC,” the Captain had told him one evening, “is that they don’t trust anyone. They don’t trust the civilians – that little kid with the candy could be a secret Raindrop, after all! –, they don’t trust the other government branches. Fucking Abyss, they don’t even trust each other.”

Gyre had nodded at that. The way the Captain talked about the internal politics of the empire had always struck him as having the sort of casual intimacy that came with having been involved with the subject matter – and he had never asked, of course, and likewise had the Captain never talked about it themselves. But Gyre – and Shiver, and a good handful of others, he thought – had his suspicions that the Captain’s previous involvement with Reille’s High Command had been a lot more hands-on than they’d ever openly admit.

Of course, the Captain was a Raindrop now. Leader of the Raindrops, having beaten the whole damn organization back out of the ground after it had been left in ruins after Floodsinger Hain’s defeat in the early days of the war, and if that didn’t count for anything then Gyre didn’t know, either.

“—and as a consequence,” the Captain’s voice had pulled him back out of his thoughts, “it means that all ACEC operatives are loners by nature. They’ll try to handle things on their own unless assistance is absolutely needed – and that makes them very effective, doesn’t it? But it also makes them very, very easy to manipulate, once you know they’re there.”

He’d raised an eyebrow at that. “How so?”

“Oh, if sufficiently put under pressure they’ll go running to their Yal eventually, don’t get me wrong. They respect useless authority as much as the rest of the fucking empire does. Gyre,” and here the Captain had leaned forward, towards him, their expression as serious as he’d ever seen it, “a hidden weakness, by its very nature, is still a weakness. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re confronted with an ACEC agent on a mission, there are two things you can do: provided you have the right papers and the bravado to back it up, you can be boring and try to pull rank on them. Pray to all the sinners that they’ll be cowed for long enough to allow you to do whatever you need to do.”

“And if I don’t want to be boring?”

“Then you use their own distrust and propensity to be lone wolves against them – be creative, Gyre! Stab them in the side while they’re still watching their back.”

 

* * *

 

Never one for predictability, Gyre went for the boring solution first.

He found Verlaine in the common area, hunched over a stack of papers and looking decidedly worse for wear. Gyre looked around to see whether anyone else was around, but there was only Avialle, slouched on top of one of the sofas and scrolling through the information on a datapad with haste.

Grabbing two glasses of water from the bar, Gyre made his way over to Verlaine.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked. He slid one of the glasses across to Verlaine, who took it with grateful smile.

“Of course. I need to finish up this paperwork, but it shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes.”

They lapsed into silence while Verlaine scribbled away, his handwriting too small and too scrawled for Gyre to be able to decipher what he was writing. Were he a more cynical person, Gyre thought, he’d almost be able to believe that these were the official forms going out to High Command to request any and all information about other ACEC operatives in the area.

But even Verlaine would not be quite so brash as that, he hoped; in any case it really did only take him three more minutes until he was finished and pushed the papers away from himself and leaned back into the high-backed chair.

“What happened to your hand?” Verlaine asked after a moment, nodding at the bandage Gyre had slapped over his bruised knuckles.

“I was ambushed by a door, fierce creatures that they are. What happened to you?” Gyre returned the question, nodding at Verlaine’s whole person.

The doctor sighed. “It was a long day, yesterday. The shock of being nearly crushed to death certainly didn’t help that, either.”

“I can imagine,” Gyre said, and only just kept himself from adding something about how finding out that there was either a usanc or another ACEC agent involved must have been quite the surprise as well. “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”

Verlaine raised an eyebrow at that.

“It’s always Farraih helping you with whatever it is you’re doing behind that secret mag-lock door, isn’t it? Doesn’t he ever need a break?” Before Verlaine could cut in with a well-deserved rebuttal of how there really wasn’t all _that_ much else to do around the facility, Gyre went on, “I think he does. Not to place any direct blame, but if he hadn’t been as—tired—as he was yesterday, there would’ve been no accident. So. How about you let me help you out for a bit?”

And before he could think about it too much, Gyre grabbed the pen he was holding, sketched a rough approximation of ACEC’s Yal Kiven’s personal pyrewren symbol in the corner of the closest document, and sent, [Come now, Yerth. It’d be easier for both of us if you said yes, wouldn’t it – I wouldn’t want to have to pull rank on you.]

There was a startled, almost wounded expression crossing over Verlaine’s face for a second – then he clamped down on it, and his face was once more unreadable. Fair enough. If he was the ACEC agent who’d contacted Gyre last night, he’d just added another chip to the pile of Gyre being an actual ACEC agent himself. And if he wasn’t—well, someone with Verlaine’s knowledge and his position here would definitely be able to recognize the pyrewren.

Verlaine gave him a nod. [Very well.] And, out loud, “Perhaps you’re right – I may have been overworking him. How about you come join me in the Dome tomorrow morning? Behind the mag-locked doors. I’ll have your badge authorized for it by this evening.”

“Fantastic.”

Verlaine nodded at him, quite evidently expecting more; yet when Gyre made no further demands, he gathered up his papers, stood up, and beat a hasty retreat.

Gyre watched him disappear with a triumphant smirk on his face.

 

* * *

 

He did not see Verlaine for the rest of the day, and neither could he find Farraih; that night, after having made several fruitless tries to contact one of Shiver’s operatives, Gyre fell asleep without hearing from either of his two suspects via telepathy, either.

 

* * *

 

The next morning found him happily swiping his badge over the scanner for the mag-locked door leading into the research facility’s inner sanctum. He’d verified the new clearance Verlaine had added late last night, but even so the brief few seconds in which the scanner processed the data made him strangely anxious.

Then the little pad let out a quiet beep, and the mag-locked doors released their hold and swung open. Had Gyre expected there to be a grand reveal of the secrets of the Reillish Empire he would have been disappointed; alas, having tailored his expectations to the mundane reality of things, he only raised a hand in greeting at Verlaine who was standing in the short, dimly-lit hallway behind the mag-door.

[Verlaine,] Gyre said once the mag-door closed behind him, no longer bothering to keep up the pretense now that there was no one else around but them.

[Gyre.] And, after a beat, [Sir.]

Covering his own hide in case Gyre really was part of Yal Kiven’s personal corps, or afraid of ACEC as civilians tended to be? Who knew, who cared—it sounded nice, either way.

[Shall we, then?]

“Follow me,” Verlaine said, and began to lead him down the corridor. Following along, Gyre soon enough found himself in yet another hall with spectacularly high ceilings, though this one, in comparison to the machinery room he had just left, was noticeably smaller. Likewise, the floor here was not covered in various pipes and protrusions and odd parts of machines, but instead what at first glance appeared to be a long, twisting array of inlaid grooves all spiraling out from a central pedestal in the middle of the room.

As Gyre approached that pedestal – careful not to step on any of the grooves, just to be safe – he saw that a slim, vaguely rifle-like piece of twisted metal sat atop it. Though perhaps twisted was too shallow a term for it: now close enough to inspect it, Gyre could see that uncountable pieces of metal were interwoven to form the aperture. As far as he could tell there was no visible energy source of the type the las-rifles favored by Reille’s infantry used, and in fact there seemed to be little of a firing mechanism at all.

“Stolen from the Kirreth after their annihilation,” Verlaine noted with a disdainful sneer when he saw Gyre’s expression. “The only way Reille could ever hope to get anything done, really. Of course Reille, much like Kirreth I presume, didn’t know what they’d gotten their hands on – until I was called to valiantly prod and poke at the thing to see how it worked and, fantastic! I got a whole lot further than just figuring out how it worked.”

There was a deeply resentful edge to his voice, and when he stepped past Gyre to grasp the thing in both hands and lifted it off the pedestal, his arms were trembling ever so slightly. [Shall I show you how it works, then?]

[Go for it.]

With the slightest of nods, Verlaine turned until his back was to Gyre and he was standing near the very center of the array on the floor. Then, hefting the weapon up in front of him, he said, “Don’t panic.”

And with that, Gyre could feel the ashen taste of Verlaine’s powers begin to manifest around him – only that where it would have usually gone directly into the psyker himself, it now did so only partially, with a good half of it focusing around the weapon instead—

The weapon bucked in Verlaine’s hands and a blast of fire engulfed the far side of the room in a glorious inferno. Before Gyre could get a good look at it, however, the inlaid array in the floor pulsed a crimson orange and the flames disappeared. In front of him, Verlaine jerked slightly – then the weapon bucked again.

The flames were so bright this time that Gyre could not help but take a few surprised steps back and squeeze shut his eyes.

When he opened them again the room was back to its normal, dimmer lighting; Verlaine had dropped the rifle-like weapon in front of him and was hunched over, panting heavily, both arms wrapped tight around his midriff.

“That weapon you stole from Kirreth? It’s not just that mangled pieced of metal here,” Verlaine ground out between gritted teeth, a full-body tremble wracking his frame, “it’s the whole room. You direct power into the catalyzer,” he pointed at the rifle-like thing, “it fires, and the arrays on the floor catch the expended psi-power and loop it back into the catalyzer. Given enough loops and a sufficiently skilled pyrokete, you could destroy all of Reille in a single blast.”

Gyre drew in a sharp breath at that. The Captain and Shiver had been right. This was not something Reille should ever be able to put to use, if the Raindrops could help it.

And with him here—well, they could. Had a chance at it, in any case.

By now the trembling had stopped and Verlaine was standing back upright again. His face was pale, however, and he was still clutching at his own ribs as if his life depended on it.

“Feedback from the weapon?” Gyre asked, keeping his tone as neutral as possible. No point in sympathizing with what could very well be an enemy he’d have to kill later on, after all.

Verlaine grit his teeth. “Yes. It—hurts. Backlash from my own power forced through the array. The longer the loop, the stronger it gets.”

Any true ACEC operative would not react to that, Gyre knew, and so he didn’t, despite the twinge of sympathy at the way Verlaine held himself upright oh so gingerly. “Does it work with other psi-powers?”

“Not as far as we could tell. Though, Kirreth couldn’t get it working at all, so perhaps we, too, are still only perceiving a fraction of what it can do.” Verlaine smiled at Gyre, and it was a thin, sharp thing of many edges. “Would you like to give it a try yourself? Perhaps you can channel your power . . .?”

Gyre laughed and, for the first time since he’d arrived at the facility, it was entirely genuinely. _Well-played, Verlaine_ , he thought, even as he said, “No, I think I’ll trust your judgement for now. You’re the scientist here, aren’t you? Me, I’m more than happy just poking at various pieces of machinery.”

Verlaine shrugged. Slowly, stiffly, he lowered himself down until he was sitting cross-legged on the floor. [Was there anything else you wanted to know?]

[Actually, yes. What do you actually _do_ in here all day?]

A smile. “We test the powerlevels of the weapon, Farraih and I. How it reacts to different parameters – what if I only hold it with one hand? What if I don’t let it loop; what if I stop the feedback midloop?” He spread his hands wide, then abruptly let them drop back down to the floor. “But mostly the two of us try to figure out how it even works in the first place.”

“And?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet. It’s been four and a half weeks since they first put me here in the facility; even R&D knows that that’s not enough to get even preliminary results from something this complex.”

Instead of replying, Gyre instead bent down and picked up the weapon from where it had been lying next to Verlaine. It was heavy in his hands, though simultaneously lighter than it looked; its various angles and twists made it fit into his hands with surprising ease. Experimentally, Gyre began to reach out to the ashen taste of pyrokinetic power around him – and, yes, even without properly drawing it up he could tell that the weapon was responding to it. There were pieces inside of it, he felt, that interlocked only when a pyrokete’s power was applied to it; for when he dropped the pyrokinesis and instead took hold of the telekinesis that must belong to Farraih, the weapon in his hands was nothing more than a piece of inert metal.

“Interesting,” he said to more to himself than Verlaine, making a mental note to tell Shiver and the Captain about this. It was both a blessing and a curse for the Raindrops and the overall success of his mission, this knowledge: without a pyrokete the weapon would be nothing more than a particularly fancy paper weight And pyroketes . . . “Pyroketes are rare even among Garden-reared psykers, aren’t they, Verlaine?”

A slight flinch. “That they are.”

Gyre nodded. “Very well.” After a slight pause, “Show me how it works again, if you would. In detail this time.”

They spent the rest of the morning trying out different things with the weapon, or, perhaps more accurately, Gyre demanding and Verlaine complying as best as he could. By the end of it, when Gyre called for a lunch break, the blonde man was as pale as the sterilized hallways outside, and his trembling had become continuous. There was a part of Gyre that felt pained at the sight and was hit with the slightest pang of guilt, but the other, more dominant one thought of how Reille would use the weapon, and rationalized it as a very much necessary evil.

Over the last few hours, Gyre had come to several conclusions: one, his initial assessment had been correct. While the weapon was immensely powerful in the hand of the right person, said right person needed to be a pyrokete – and unless the empire had a whole cadre of them stashed away somewhere, Gyre very much doubted that even a whole crate full of the weapons would be able to change much.

Two, use of the weapon appeared to require a certain mindset, as well as an apparently increasingly high tolerance for pain. It was the latter which was already causing problems, as far as Gyre could tell; in the last looping before he’d called for a halt, Verlaine had been shaking so badly that Gyre had been momentarily afraid that he’d drop the weapon while it was still powering through its loops. He hadn’t – no telling what would have happened to the already looped power – but it had been a very close thing, and Verlaine had looked at him with such ridiculous gratefulness when Gyre’d declared that it was time for a break that he was, quite honestly, somewhat reluctant to go back to it in the afternoon.

But even if Verlaine wasn’t the ACEC agent, Gyre was living on borrowed time already, and _Reille needed to fall_. If Verlaine’s well-being was the trade-off for figuring out as much as he could about the weapon, then that, Gyre knew the Captain would argue, was a fair price to pay.

 

* * *

 

By the time the two of them were done with their lunch of questionable vegetables and nicely-baked bread, Gyre had almost managed to convince himself to lead Verlaine back into the chamber with the weapon. The other man’s trembling had finally subsided, although, as Gyre noted with gritted teeth, he still flinched with every movement he made, and when he made to leave the common room, he did so on unsteady legs.

Before either he or Gyre could actually get anywhere, however, Farraih appeared in the doorway. Arms crossed over his chest he made for an imposing figure, and the smile on his face looked as artificial to Gyre as the simulated sun-bright light in the corridor behind him.

“Everything going alright?” Farraih asked, still with that smile plastered to his lips. “You look a bit exhausted there, Verlaine – I hope Gyre there isn’t making you do all the work!”

Verlaine let out a little laugh. “Oh, no, he’s been a big help, actually.”

“Has he.”

“I’m doing my best, in any case,” Gyre joined in, giving Farraih a curious look. Was that jealousy he saw twinkling in his eyes? For what? “And I do believe we have some more work to get back to, so if you’ll excuse us . . .”

With that he pushed past them, fully intending on waiting around the nearest corner to see what the two of them were up to. Just as he walked past Farraih, however,

[—room tonight, then. Don’t be late.]

brushed past his thoughts and it was all he could do to continue walking and not jerk his head around at Farraih and Verlaine. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Verlaine nodding, then he was past them and could let the shock show on his face.

 _Both_ of them were ACEC?

 

* * *

 

Shiver paced back and forth inside the Captain’s small office with such ferocity that in her wake, several papers had already been dislodged from their piled perches. Her face was drawn and the dark shadows under her eyes spoke of the scant few hours’ worth of sleep she’d managed to catch over the last few days. The Captain, sitting in their chair and watching Shiver, didn’t look any better, though they had never been one for showing any emotion they didn’t want to and were so silently watching Shiver’s pacing.

It eventually fell to Gyre, seated next to the Captain and dangerously close to falling asleep right there and then, to break the long silence. “It was a disaster. But—“

Shiver snorted but did not so much as miss a step. “No buts there, Gyre. ‘It was a disaster’ sums it up well enough.”

“It wasn’t your fault, though,” he said, addressing both her and the Captain, “you couldn’t have known. Nobody could’ve—the whole town, really? That’s insane, even by High Command’s standards.”

A chuckle from the Captain, and a gentle pat on Gyre’s shoulder as they reached out to him. “I should be consoling you, if anything. The fire—My apologies.”

“The whole Abyss-damned town,” Shiver hissed, “and we ran straight into it.”

Vainrefh had been a little village on the northern edge of the empire, built up on farming long before the empire had first had ambitions but turned to a supplier-town for the nearby Garden once that had been erected. Vainrefh’s people still honored their own traditions – and that, coupled with the empire’s ever-growing need for resources, should’ve meant that the Raindrops should have had an easy time of turning Vainrefh to their cause.

Should have.

Didn’t.

Shiver and her operatives had taken on the actual recruiting, the countless meetings with the village representatives, the distribution of leaflets and food and, most importantly, non-empire regulated news. She had the whole thing down pat, repetition being the best practice; when she had deemed Vainrefh’s population to be sufficiently swayed to their cause, she’d called in the Captain to seal the alliance. Gyre had tagged along because he always did – he’d be able to take note of any psykers and, in the worst-case scenario, protect the Captain from any undercover ACEC agents or anti-Raindrop-minded usancs.

His powers had not been necessary today, because Reille’s High Command, bastards that they were, had simply firebombed the whole village from afar.

It had been all the Raindrops could do to get out alive, and even so, only half of the group they had arrived with had made it back out. The handful of Vainrefh’s civilians they had been able to drag with them, now being taken care in the Raindrops’ infirmary, were a testament to their failure.

“There must have been an ACEC spy somewhere among the villagers,” the Captain now said, their tone very, very neutral. Gyre glanced at Shiver, expecting to see anger; but she, too, must have caught the deliberate attempt to not lay any blame at her feet. “With Vainrefh being a Garden-supplier, there were bound to be some. Surprising that they would have managed to infiltrate as far high up as the village council in a town like that, but that’s ACEC for you.”

Vehemently Shiver shook her head. “I should’ve been more careful. It was my duty to—”

“Shiver,” the Captain cut in, voice still as level as Gyre had ever heard it from them, “we—I—may riff on them on occasion, and I will not deny that we all of us have always been very lucky in our encounters with them, but the truth of the matter is that ACEC is _good_. Even before Yal Kiven they were a force to behold, and now that he’s taken over they’ve become the boogey-men of the empire in truth. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It really wasn’t,” Gyre agreed after a suitably long moment had passed.

Shiver sighed. Nodded.

The Captain pushed themselves out of their chair and leaned across the table, picking up several papers that had become dislodged from their place by Shiver’s pacing. “But we nevertheless need to figure out how to salvage the situation.”

 

* * *

 

That night, Gyre waited until everyone had retired from the common room before he headed towards his own room. Taye and Avialle had both left together, though that was no surprise; and both Farraih and Verlaine had both worked silently – and independently – on some documents before first Farraih, then Verlaine excused themselves. Gyre hadn’t caught any more telepathic communication between the two of them, but what he had heard earlier was enough.

There was a little alcove next to Farraih’s room, which usually held a big plant that was clearly fake—tonight, it would have to hold Gyre as well. The walls of the research compound, at least where the living quarters were concerned, were little better than paper; if Farraih and Verlaine were planning something out loud he might have a chance of hearing it. If they resorted to telepathy – well, his chances were a lot worse, then, but as he’d learned firsthand earlier, the two of them were careless in their communication. Telepathy was among one of the first psychic powers Gyre had practiced with: if there were any stray thoughts flung about, he felt confident that he could catch them.

The alcove had just barely enough room for him next to the plant, but with a little bit of squeezing and some silent curses, Gyre made do. He was fairly well-covered by the leaves, too; this was fantastic in case anyone walked by, but did in fact make him feel as if he was in one of those terrible spy flicks they’d showed to the children at his Garden.

Nobody walked by, and before long the motion-activated lights dimmed to their usual nighttime-gloom. Gyre relaxed as much as he could and slowly, quietly, leaned his head against the wall belonging to Farraih’s room.

“—ridiculous. He indicated that he’s ACEC,” Verlaine’s voice came, sounding defensive. “Telepathy, Yal Kiven’s symbol, and quite frankly being here in the first place? Sounds like he’s one of yours to me.”

Farraih, “He’s not one of Yal Kiven’s, and if he were regular ACEC I would’ve been notified.”

“Would you, really? You don’t seem the—“

A dull thud, yet audible even through the wall. Gyre sucked in a hissing breath and, holding it, waited for a response.

None came.

A minute passed. And another.

And then Farraih’s voice again, lower, sounding just a bit out of breath, “ _There_ we go. The thing is, Verlaine,” a soft pant, “there’s just no reason for Gyre to be ACEC. Oh, he’s got the lingo down and he certainly has the telepathy, but the Yal wouldn’t send another operative when I’m already here.”

Sputtering, and a laugh from Farraih.

“I’m more than capable of keeping you in line, aren’t I? What would Gyre say, do you think, if he saw you like this? Fucking little Raindrop, he’d probably try and start a rebellion—all they’re good for, aren’t they. And you, you’re good for—“ Another pause, shorter this time, broken by a groan. “Abyss, yeah, take it—ah, swallow, come on, there’s a good—“

More panting.

Gyre fled to his room as quickly and quietly as he could.

 

* * *

 

And only when even the echo of his footfalls had dimmed down did the artificial plant rustle slightly, as if caught in an unseen breeze.

 

* * *

 

A noise from near the door woke him entirely too early in the morning. Groggy, head still swimming from the night’s revelations, it took Gyre a fair moment before the dim timer being projected against the wall by his alarm clock registered – it was much too early for this to be a regular social call. But Verlaine’s pyrokinesis as well as Farraih’s telekinesis were still within easy grasp when Gyre experimentally reached for them, and so he didn’t feel particularly threatened when the knocking turned into the full-on pounding of fists against his door.

Farraih or Verlaine? Were he actually being paid for this mission, Gyre would put that sadly non-existent money on Farraih.

In one languid movement Gyre sat up and got out of bed. There was no need to open the door himself – voice-activated controls would take care of that for him – but years of practice had ingrained in him the preference that if he had to face off with ACEC in his night clothes, he’d at least do it on his feet.

He cracked his knuckles for good measure, then said very clearly, “Come on in.”

The door opened with an almost silent slide.

It wasn’t Verlaine who stood there in the doorway, illuminated from behind by the corridor’s dim lights to give him an ethereal outline.

It wasn’t Farraih, either.

“We need to talk,” Avialle said, already pushing past Gyre and leaving the door to automatically swish closed behind her.

Gyre watched her with a raised eyebrow, his mask of studied indifference once more firmly slotting into place. “Do we,” he said at length. “About what?”

Avialle stood there in the middle of his small room, arms crossed over her chest, and a strange, curious sort of anger simmering in her eyes. And she said, “About the weapon. About Farraih and Verlaine. About what we’re going to do with all three of them.” And, delivered with such precision that even the Captain would’ve been envious, “About you being a Raindrop, Gyre.”

A beat.

“Well. Have I been amazingly awful at hiding my true affiliation, or has it just been an open secret to begin with?” Gyre stepped towards Avialle, telekinesis firm in his grasp – he pushed at her, first lightly, then, before she could react, with more force until her back was against the closed door. “Are you ACEC too, then? Farraih tell you to come intimidate me? Tell you what, Avialle, you’re going to have to bring a bit more than just a disapproving look for that.”

She scowled. Gyre could feel her testing the hold of his telekinesis on her, and, when she realized that there was no give to be found there, she relaxed into the bonds. “If I’d been ACEC, you would already be knocked out cold and being flown away on an ornithopter.” A smile flitted across her lips, sharp and full of teeth. “I’m not ACEC, Gyre. I’m Kirreth,” she said, and with that a wave of the ephemeral power he’d been sensing ever since stepping foot inside the facility washed over her, and her whole body _changed_.

Where previously she had been tall and vaguely thin, she was now a thing of sharp edges and thin wires; her shardsteel-supplemented skin cold even to Gyre’s telekinetic touch, the metal’s natural aversion to psychic influence evident even in these small quantities.

The empire had deemed the Kirreth abominations. Who in their right mind would willingly replace their own body with metal parts, after all? Gyre himself had never seen a true Kirreth before; their cities having been destroyed not long after Reille had learned of shardsteel’s psi-deadening properties – but looking at Avialle now, he found that there was a harsh, sleek beauty to the twisting cables and subarmored panels that made up her body. He could certainly understand why the empire had feared them enough to eradicate every last one.

Well. Perhaps not _every_ last one.

It took Gyre a good, long moment until he could even begin to think about getting his thoughts in order. In the end, all he could do was let out a disbelieving laugh. “Is there _anyone_ at this facility who’s not lying about their identity, then?”

Avialle cocked her head and smirked at him. “In a sense there’s Taye, of course.”

“She’s not with you?”

“Oh, no, she very much is, but she’s not Kirreth. Farraih of course is ACEC, sent to keep an eye on the weapon and Verlaine; you’re a Raindrop, presumably here to do the same. And me, I’m _Kirreth_ – it was my people’s weapon to begin with, and if at all possible I’d like for it to not be Reille’s newest tool of destruction.”

Understanding began to dawn, then, if somewhat slowly. “Verlaine?”

Avialle laughed, and at a twitch of her shardmetal fingers Gyre relinquished his hold on her. “Verlaine is the only actual scientist in the whole damn building.”

Gyre closed his eyes and took a deep, deep breath. When he opened them again, he said, “Well. _Well_. And where does that leave us, Avialle of the Kirreth?” Following his words, her psi-power washed over the small room again – and between one breath and the next, Avialle was clad in a body of flesh once more. Gyre narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s not a Kirreth thing, is it? It’s a psi-power.”

“Correct. I’m an illusionist,” Avialle said, now pushing away from the wall and settling down in the sole chair in the room. “Natural-born. Not particularly powerful, but powerful enough, if you catch my drift – means I got lucky when Reille’s forces came for my country – means you’re lucky, too.”

An illusionist. Rare, and as far as Gyre knew the empire’s Gardens had never been able to produce one – he himself had never come across one before Avialle, but there were stories from the days of the Floodsinger. Their entourage had included an illusionist as well, if he recalled correctly; she had died together with the Floodsinger in their final stand against Reille.

“How will you being an illusionist be of any help to me?” he asked after a moment, deciding to play dumb for the sake of finding out just how much she knew.

“Gyre, please. I saw you use telekinesis on the tank that Farraih dropped, and I know for a fact that you’re not a telekine. And there’ve always been rumors about you Raindrops, readily available to those who would listen—your Captain, with no psi-powers to speak of; their second-in-command, a hydrokete; and that ever-elusive third, whose powers match whoever he goes up against.” She gave him a meaningful look. “Does it have a proper name, what you do?”

No use beating around the bush, then. “We’ve been calling it a mirror,” Gyre told her, and grabbed for the ephemeral feel of Avialle’s illusionist psi-powers. The feeling was alien, and dulled somewhat by the shardsteel; still he managed to grasp it and briefly withdraw the illusion-veil from Avialle’s hand. Within mere seconds it flickered back, and he let out a breath. “Like that.”

She raised her hand to her face, clenching and unclenching her once-more human fingers. “Impressive.” The chair creaked as she leaned back into it. “It’ll come in handy, I’m sure.”

Back to that, then. “Why—for what? From what you’ve been saying, you seem to have been aware that I was a Raindrop ever since I held the tank. Why only come to me now?”

“Because you have a problem, and since Taye and I are unaffiliated yet firmly anti-Reille, by extension _we_ have a problem. Farraih’s contacted High Command. He knows you’re not ACEC, and they’re sending a shock troop here to contain you and extract Verlaine and the weapon as soon as possible.”

“And how do you know that?”

She smirked. “Do you think illusioning myself to look like a flesh and blood human is the only thing I can do with my powers?”

“Fair enough.” He sighed. “Do you have a plan, then? I assume you wouldn’t have come to me and blown your own cover if you weren’t getting something out of it.”

“I do, in fact. Listen.”

And Gyre did.

The crux of the matter, as both Gyre and Avialle understood it, was that they could not, under any circumstances, allow Reille to keep the Kirreth weapon. Avialle didn’t care what happened to it, though she preferred for it to be destroyed; Gyre, meanwhile, would’ve preferred for it to go to the Raindrops, but, foregoing that, would also happily see the whole Abyss-damned thing turned into a heap of slag metal.

Avialle and Taye had had their plans; Gyre had had his own. With Farraih calling in backup, both of those had been shot to the Abyss and back.

“We have a day at best,” Avialle said. “Farraih needs to confirm the exact strike timing tomorrow at noon; if we want to have any time at all to destroy the weapon, we need to take him out before then. And by we, I mean you; neither Taye nor I are particularly good fighters.”

That figured. “I’m more than happy to give it a go—what will you be doing in the meantime?”

“Taye will be running interference on Farraih’s comm calls. You’ve been doing a good job of hindering any official communiqués, but he’s got a personal datafeed port.”

And that figured, too, and it galled Gyre that neither Shiver nor he had thought of it.  “What about Verlaine? You said he was open to anti-empire sentiments,” Gyre asked, “can we use him?”

“We’re going to have to. I’ve seen the way he looks at you,” Avialle replied. “And whether or not you reciprocate – I don’t care either way – you can use that to turn him to your cause. It won’t take much,” she added, her eyebrows drawing into a tight line, “because the way I see it, Verlaine’s been waiting to jump ship for a long time now. Pyroketes are in high demand, and Farraih—well, he’s not the only one among ACEC or the empire’s higher-ups who likes to abuse his authority over psykers. Give him some good incentive to destroy the weapon, and I’m sure he’ll go for it.” A sigh. “He’s going to have to, because it’s a pyrokete’s weapon. Non-pyroketes can’t power, let alone destroy it.”

“How does a weapon like that make _any_ sense?” Gyre groaned, only half-joking. “But, certainly. I’ll go talk to Verlaine, see whether he’s up to sticking it to the empire.”

 “Good. As for the plan to take on Farraih—“

 

* * *

 

By the time they had finished hashing out their plan, it was mere minutes before Gyre’s alarm would have rung anyway. He scrubbed a hand through his hair with a sigh, then, with another, even heavier sigh, he went about quickly composing a message to Shiver.

He sent it off without so much as a second glance, his gaze instead drawn to the alarm clock again.

Barely six hours until Farraih was scheduled to confirm the strike.

 


	3. Chapter 3

_part 3: antipyretic_

 

++A datanet feed.

No discernible visuals.

No audio.

Static slowly covers the screen.++

 

* * *

 

Freshly-showered and powered by grim determination if not much sleep, Gyre knocked on the door to Verlaine’s private rooms. It took a couple of long moments, but eventually the door glided open to reveal Verlaine standing there, arms crossed over his chest and looking exactly as sleep-deprived as Gyre felt. For once his glasses were actually where they were supposed to be, and with the light from the corridor reflecting off of them ever so slightly, they made his expression entirely unreadable.

What they did not manage to hide, however, was the massive bruise blooming across the left side of his face in mottled blues and dark reds. Gyre had to fight to keep the grimace off his face when he saw it, though going by the stiffening of Verlaine’s shoulders, he didn’t quite succeed.

No use in playing coy, anyway, though he would need to figure out just how much Verlaine knew. “What happened?”

Now it was Verlaine’s turn to grimace. “Why don’t you come in,” he eventually said, and moved aside to let Gyre into his rooms.

With a quick glance to reassure himself that Farraih wasn’t waiting for him inside poised in a typically ACEC-backhanded ambush, Gyre entered. It was only when the door had glided closed behind him once more that he managed to drag his attention away from the ripped up documents littering the floor that greeted him in stark contrast to the waist-high stacks of papers he recalled from his earlier visit.

Verlaine was leaning against the now closed door with his arms crossed over his chest, silently watching Gyre. When their eyes met, he cleared his throat. “Can I ask you something?”

Gyre shrugged, not quite sure where this was supposed to be going but more than willing to indulge Verlaine and put off the inevitable confrontation a bit longer. “Go ahead.”

“Are you ACEC?”

Ah. Right to the heart of the matter, then. [No,] Gyre sent, shifting his stance slightly so that he could fight back, should it come to that. [I’m not.]

He needn’t have bothered. Verlaine deflated visibly at his reply, slumping back even further against the door and letting his head thump lightly against it. “Raindrop?”

“Yes.”

“So Farraih wasn’t lying about that, at least.”

Silence. Neither of them so much as moved. Eventually, Gyre ventured, “Farraih’s ACEC?”

And only now did Verlaine open his eyes again and look at Gyre. Anger glinted in his eyes, visible even in the dim light filtering throughout the room, and his lips curled up into a snarl as he said, “Don’t _fuck_ with me, Gyre. He told me he’d contacted you a few days back, and that you made a good show of pretending to be ACEC yourself – you’re very good at lying, aren’t you? Had me fooled, at least, and I’d wager that if you hadn’t—“ A thought must have occurred to him then, for his expression grew level and his eyes took on the cold hardness of flint. “Was that all part of your cover too, then? Eventually seduce the pyrokete and then kill him in bed?”

“Verlaine—“

“Because if it was, you need to up your game. What, were you thinking you had a year to get into my pants? Time to take it real slow and whatnot? Because—“

[ _Verlaine_!] That got through to him, and he fell silent. “It wasn’t part of the plan. My mission was to either retrieve or destroy the weapon, and to either persuade you to come along or—“ Gyre hesitated, then decided that he was already in deep enough that he might as well put all his cards on the table. “—kill you.”

Verlaine only raised an eyebrow.

“As a last resort, mind you; and obviously I’d prefer not to have to kill anyone at all.” A lie; Farraih needed to go, and Gyre would happily burn him to cinders. “But you were right: I thought I’d have a bit more time than the scant two weeks I ended up being given. Luck just wasn’t on my side.”

It was the right thing to say, apparently, as Verlaine’s posture softened ever so slightly even as he reached up to gingerly touch the bruised side of his face. “Farraih tends to have that effect on things, doesn’t he.” A pause. “He’s called in for backup, you know. He made me make the call together with him yesterday night. You should get out while you still can.”

“I know, but no can do there. And shouldn’t you be doing your very best to keep me here, instead? High Command will be pissed if they find out you could’ve captured me but didn’t,” Gyre asked, a slow, surprised smile ghosting over his lips.

“ _Fuck_ High Command,” Verlaine replied, expression flint-steel again. Then it softened, and he met Gyre’s eyes with a smirk. “And didn’t you say you were planning on persuading me to defect? Well. Have at it.”

Now Gyre really did let out a delighted little laugh – he couldn’t believe his luck. When he’d told Avialle that he’d try to get Verlaine to destroy the weapon for them, he’d envisioned himself having to do it with a lot more brute force and well-placed threats. But this? Gyre shook his head in amazement. “And to have thought that only a couple of days ago I’d almost been convinced you were ACEC . . .”

At that, Verlaine’s eyes grew brittle and cold again. “Hah. Me, ACEC? I don’t have the stomach for it. Never made it past the initial training. But that didn’t stop Reille, did it? Oh, no.” Verlaine laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “I’m a pyrokete. I’m _worth_ something to the empire. Can’t just let a kid you’ve spent seven years raising go back to his family, can you? Not when he’s an Abyss-damned pyrokete.” A pause, followed by another pained laugh. “Floodsinger Hain had the right of it, you know—Reille needed to fall then and it desperately needs to do so now. Tear the whole fucking thing down and leave the Raindrops to wash over the ruins—“

“Sounds to me like you don’t need all that much convincing to switch sides,” Gyre cut in, taking a measured step towards Verlaine and, when nothing happened, another until he was close enough to lay what he hoped was a calming hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Verlaine. Farraih is a bastard, but we can get out of this—you can leave the empire. I’ll help. The Raindrops—“

Gyre never did get to say just what the Raindrops could do for him, because just then Verlaine shrugged off his hand and leaned forward and pressed his lips to Gyre’s.

Gyre could only stand there frozen for a good second or so, then, without thinking about it, he reciprocated the kiss. Pressing forward, he crowded Verlaine back against the door, one hand once more curling around his shoulder while the other came to rest on his hips; he let out a soft moan as Verlaine deepened the kiss—

And then Verlaine pulled away and pushed against Gyre’s chest until he’d backed up a step.

“What was that for?” Gyre asked, more out of breath than he should reasonably be, and not quite sure just whether he was asking about the kiss or the pushing away or something else entirely.

“I wanted to see whether you were telling the truth, earlier, about not angling for this to get me to renounce the empire. And you were, weren’t you?” A sigh. “You’re an idiot.”

With that, Verlaine pushed away from him entirely and moved over to sit on the edge of his bed. With a sigh, he dropped his head into his hands, ruffled his hair – and then looked up at Gyre with fierce determination in his eyes. “Well. I assume you have a plan as to what to do about Farraih and the weapon?”

Gyre licked his lips. Smiled. “I do indeed.”

 

* * *

 

They’d both settled down on the edge of the bed; Verlaine still taut as a bowstring while Gyre did his best to exude an aura of confidence he wasn’t entirely feeling. They sat closely next to each other without actually touching, yet the mood was companionable even as they discussed how to best deal with the current situation. To his credit, Verlaine had taken the revelation that Avialle was Kirreth surprisingly well, even making a comment about how that certainly explained why so many pieces of machinery so frequently tended to go missing; likewise, he was wholly behind Gyre and Avialle’s plan to destroy the weapon if at all possible.

“It’s a terrible, broken thing,” he said when Gyre had given him a look. “The array amplifies its power even further, and it helps to deal with the . . . aftershocks, if you will. It’s not a weapon I would wish on anyone to use, let alone be used against them.”

“You’ll handle its destruction while I go deal with Farraih, then?”

Verlaine stilled at his words. “You’re still adamant of going up against him on your own, then?”

“Honestly,” Gyre told him, “it’s not my idea of a good time, either. But there’s no time to do it another way. Taye and Avialle need to run interference on the comms in case Farrah tries to contact High Command or his ACEC reinforcements; you need to destroy the Kirreth weapon and I can’t help you with that.”

Except he could, he suspected; if it was a pyrokete’s power that could make or break the weapon, then his mirrored pyrokinesis should also be able to do the job. But he hadn’t yet told Verlaine about how his powers worked, save that he _had_ psychic abilities, and the crux of his argument held true regardless: there was no time. He wasn’t well-versed enough in pyrokinesis to be of any real help in what would most likely be a very focused application of it; and Verlaine, for all his readily apparent drive to get revenge against Farraih, didn’t strike him as the combat type. Much like Taye and Avialle, he’d be better off dealing with something else while Gyre faced down Farraih.

Next to him, Verlaine shook his head. “Farraih will kill you. He’s one of Yal Kiven’s personal staff – he’s probably taken down more psykers than you even have in your resistance in the first place. You’ll be like the raindrop falling into the campfire – dead in seconds.”

“And yet we can’t just leave him be while you try to destroy the weapon, and we don’t have anyone else to match him. It has to be me,” Gyre said, feeling weary. “And it’s not as if I don’t have any experience fighting ACEC.” Perhaps not one of Yal Kiven’s staff, no, but then again even one of Yal Kiven’s people had never gone up against a mirror before – and a telekine? There were far worse powers to go up against, as far as Gyre was concerned.

[What can I say to convince you to wait until I can help you against him, then?] Verlaine asked, turning to Gyre and raising a hand to slowly stroke along Gyre’s neck. When at last it came to rest over his pulse, however, Verlaine flinched back. [You’re very calm for someone ready to die.]

[I’ve been living on borrowed time since the Garden I was raised at burnt down. This is fate catching up with me, nothing more.] He forced a smile. “That’s being incredibly fatalistic, though – I don’t plan to die at all.”

Verlaine squeezed his shoulder, then abruptly let his hand drop. “It’s incredible you Raindrops haven’t been wiped out decades ago, if you’re all this self-sacrificing.”

“Yeah, well.” Wasn’t as if that was the first time he’d heard that line of argument. “Do you know why we call ourselves Raindrops?”

A frown. “No. Something to do with Floodsinger Hain, I assume—“

“Exactly. The Floodsinger was a hydrokete, of course; it’s in their name. And by all accounts they were very, very powerful: they sang down the clouds and brought storms. And in the end, even that wasn’t enough to beat Reille.”

Verlaine let out a dark chuckle. “Your point being?”

“The Floodsinger was powerful, but they were still only single person. A single raindrop can’t do much on its own but evaporate – but if there are a lot of raindrops, all falling together? Then a single raindrop can cause a flood.” He leaned over to Verlaine, grabbed his hand. “And we Raindrops, we’re working towards that flood. It doesn’t matter if one of us goes down, because the Raindrops aren’t just one person – and nothing ever happens in a vacuum, Verlaine. If I die here, you can be assured I’m taking Farraih with me. And his death will send out ripples, and perhaps some of those ripples will just die in the shallows, but others will carry on and join us and eventually, we’ll wash away High Command itself.”

A long, unreadable look from Verlaine. Then, “Did you practice that speech?”

“I did, actually. But my point stands: it’s not just me fighting against Farraih. It’s Avialle and Taye stopping comms, it’s you destroying the weapon – Farraih is only a small part of the whole. And the four of us? Here, today, we’ll be a flood that Farraih and High Command behind him won’t be able to stand against.”

A moment of pure, dreadful silence.

“You’re so _earnest_ ,” Verlaine sighed, and there was something very much like fondness in his eyes when he winked at Gyre.

 

* * *

 

Gyre and Verlaine parted ways in the common room, and Gyre tried and failed to not feel as if he were getting ready to march to his death. He hadn’t lied, when he’d told Verlaine that he wasn’t planning on dying; but, also, he knew full well that Farraih would put up one hell of a fight. And if his own death was what it took to kill Farraih and buy Verlaine enough time to destroy the Kirreth weapon, then so be it.

The common room was eerily quiet as Gyre walked over to one of the high-backed chairs.

_Well then._

[Farraih,] he called once has was sitting comfortably. [Jig’s up. You’re going down – you want to surrender, or do you want to make this difficult?]

It took a moment, but then, [ _Gyre_.]

 

* * *

 

Farraih was waiting for him not in front of, nor in the bottom level of, but atop the clock tower.

[Over-dramatic bastard,] Gyre told him as he climbed the stairs. No answer, but then, he didn’t expect one. Went against ACEC protocol to talk to the person you were supposed to execute, didn’t it?

Gritting his teeth, Gyre continued his ascent. As he put more and more steps behind himself, he opened himself up to the psychic powers still swirling around the building. There was Farraih’s own telekinesis, of course, and Gyre knew that he was going to have to do his very best not to get into a direct matching of power with him on that – he would never be able to win against a properly-trained ACEC operative. There was Verlaine’s pyrokinesis as well, the trump card Farraih would not expect but which even now Gyre was hesitant to use. But, behind all that: the ephemeral, wispy sense of Avialle’s power lingered within range still.

A last resort, then, for whatever good illusions could do. But it felt good to have a power Farraih didn’t know anything about, and Gyre climbed the stairs with renewed vigor at the thought of rubbing it in the bastard’s surprised face.

There was a door, at the top of the clock tower. It was closed, but not locked; Gyre pushed it aside with a light touch of telekinesis. Beyond: the rooftop. A plain, level surface of weathered stone that seemed reassuringly solid when Gyre stepped onto it.

Farraih stood right smack dab in the middle of it, and greeted Gyre with a mocking salute.

[ACEC train you in theatrics too, then? It certainly would explain why you’ve been so awful at all other aspects of your job,] Gyre sent, and it was with great pleasure that he noted Farraih narrowing his eyes angrily at him. [What, you jealous that I spirited your pyrokete away from you? Tough luck—]

He’d been waiting for the telekinetic blow and so it didn’t catch him as off-guard as Farraih must have hoped, but the sheer power behind it was nevertheless enough to send Gyre skidding back into the now-closed door.

As soon as Farraih’s power abated, Gyre pushed back in turn – not at Farraih but against the door behind him, propelling himself forward and pulling the sheet of metal the door was made up of along with him. Farraih dodged out of the way just in time, rolling to the side and pushing at the metal with his own telekinesis as soon as he was back on his feet.

By that point Gyre had already jumped off of it, and so even as the door was pushed over the side of the railing and plummeted down to the ground far below, he was already readying himself for his next strike.

Experimentally he used Farraih’s own telekinesis to push at him—but he needn’t have bothered, Farraih able to counteract it without any apparent effort.

 _Alright_.

The ashen scent of Verlaine’s pyrokinesis was all-encompassing even up here, and Gyre did not hold his breath when he took hold of it, but it was a very close thing—

But he drew on it, and with a shout he sent a bolt of fire spiraling towards Farraih.

It hit.

Flames engulfed Farraih for a long heartbeat before vanishing back into the psi-realm they’d emerged out of – but the burns they’d caused in that brief moment remained, even if they wouldn’t be anything more than superficial at this point.

No immediate retaliation came from Farraih, who instead only stood there, examining first his burnt hands and tattered uniform before looking across the rooftop at Gyre with an astonished expression. [You—]

“Something you didn’t expect, huh?” Gyre pushed another blast of flame at Farraih, who rolled out of the way just a bit too late to avoid all of it. Watching Farraih swat at his own arm to put out the embers taking hold there proved to be just distracting enough for Gyre to not see the piece of metal zooming towards him until it was almost in front of him.

He threw up the telekinesis but only managed to deflect its course, and the back end of the pipe – a piece of railing, it seemed like – hit his ribcage and dragged a long rip through both cloth and skin. Not nearly bad enough to slow Gyre down, thankfully, and he pulled himself together for another—

An explosion shook the clocktower, and for a moment, it seemed as if time itself stood still. Farraih halted in his tracks, one arm still raised and another long piece of pipe from the railing still quivering in the air beside him – but he, like Gyre, found his gaze drawn towards the side of the clocktower, where plumes of smoke now began to quickly billow up into the air. Another explosion, and now that he was actively watching, Gyre could see pieces of what had once been the research facility being thrown up into the air before coming to crash down into the smoke.

Time reasserted itself—

“That’ll have been Verlaine blowing up your Kirreth weapon,” Gyre shouted, throwing blasts of fire at Farraih with each word.

Farraih didn’t say anything at all, instead completing the forward jab of his arm—

And the metal pipe struck Gyre in his left thigh with such force that the impact knocked him flat on his back. Pain flared out from his leg immediately, and Gyre choked out a gasp as he hit the ground, fighting every instinct screaming at him to curl up into a ball and instead forcing himself back first onto his hands, then knees, then—

Abyss, no, one knee. No more. The leg that had been hit crumpled under him as soon as he put any weight on it, and the pain radiating out from it was all-encompassing. Gyre couldn’t help it. He screamed.

Farraih’s glee washed over him through the telepathic link, though no words accompanied it, and even through the flakey haze of pain Gyre could hear footsteps moving towards him.

Gyre pulled on Avialle’s illusionist powers, then. It felt like grabbing at silk scarves; the sense of something slipping through his fingers all the quicker the harder he tried to hold onto it. But threads of the material caught, and he wove them first into an image of himself standing up and limping over to a spot as far to his left as he could, and then, at the same time, he cloaked his real form.

Laboriously, Gyre pulled himself into a half-crouch. Farraih had taken the bait and was moving towards the illusion now, but even as Gyre watched, panting, he could feel his own hold on the illusionist psi-power fading. Both the image of himself and the cloaking he’d draped across his real body shattered just as Farraih reached the image – Farraih stiffened, wrenched loose another piece of railing with a quick wave of his hand, and turned around.

[What are you?] he asked, lazily, self-assuredly, knowing just as well as Gyre that there were not a great many ways that this confrontation could still go. [Come, now, the longer you talk to me the longer you stay alive.] He took a step towards Gyre, the pipe raised threateningly behind himself.

[Fuck you,] replied Gyre.

Another step. [You had me fooled for a while there, did you know that? Right up until Verlaine told me you were one of Yal Kiven’s. We may be secretive, but even ACEC isn’t _that_ splintered.]

[Villainous monologues are a crime against humanity,] Gyre told him, snarling, [but you Reillish dog would know all about that, wouldn’t you.]

Another step. Almost in front of Gyre, now. [Nothing? No spitting defiance, no last-ditch attempt to get me to spare you?] Farraih grinned. [Disappointing, even for a Raindrop.]

“Not a single step further!” came the shout from behind Gyre and, so intense that he almost bit his tongue in response, [Down!]

He dropped onto his good leg, and above him the air charred with the intensity of the bolt of fire that arced across it—

It hit Farraih not square in the chest, but very close to it.

Flames engulfed him for a heartbeat before vanishing back into the ether, leaving behind angry red blisters and burnt flesh.

[Again,] Gyre sent, and another bolt shot at Farraih, weaker this time though still with impressive accuracy.

[Again—]

[I can’t— _it_ _hurts_.]

Only now did Gyre look up and back at Verlaine – who had not come empty-handed, but was instead holding the Kirreth weapon in shaking hands.

[You _idiot_ ,] Gyre sent. [You were supposed to destroy it!]

[Couldn’t,] Verlaine replied, trembles already beginning to wrack his frame, [and you seemed like you could use the help.]

With great effort, Gyre dragged himself back up to his feet. Favoring his good leg where possible, he hastily wobbled over to Verlaine, while behind them Farraih groaned and metal creaked.

[You good for one more shot?]

[I’ll have to be.]

Gyre laid his hands atop Verlaine’s. [Do it.]

And even as Verlaine once more channeled his psi-powers into the Kirreth weapon, Gyre, too, reached out to grasp the pyrokinesis – only instead of directing it outwards, he fed it into the weapon right alongside Verlaine’s own psychic fire.

The Kirreth weapon exploded with power.

A brilliant beam of fire lanced out from it and leapt towards Farraih, engulfing him even as he was still trying to pull himself to his feet. It wrapped around his form quickly, flickers reaching out for his legs and his arms and, ultimately, his head, enveloping him until nothing remained but pure fire. There was a moment where Farraih was illuminated both from without and within, and then, in a flash of light as bright as the sun, he simply disintegrated into flakes of smoldering ashes.

Gyre breathed in—

And as the last bit of ash hit the charred ground, the breeze-like wispy feeling of telekinesis that had been surrounding Gyre from the moment he’d arrived at the facility vanished.

The weapon dropped to the floor between him and Verlaine, seeming no worse for the wear. As Gyre turned to give Verlaine a triumphant smile, however, he saw that the same did not hold true for its wielder: doubled over and clutching at his ribs, Verlaine began coughing.

And coughing.

And—

[Fuck fuck fuck _fuck_ —]

As the bout of coughing subsided, Verlaine crumpled to the ground, spitting wads of viscous red liquid. Gyre was at his side in an instant, the pain from his broken leg forgotten as he wrapped an arm around Verlaine’s shoulders to steady him. When his breathing had finally evened out somewhat, Gyre gently helped him sit down.

Around them, the building burned. Flames licked up the side of the rooftop now, and the staircase, from what Gyre could see, had already become a plume of smoke.

“Well,” he breathed, and slumped down beside Verlaine, his leg no longer even minimally able to support him.

Something deep within the foundations of the clocktower crackled. Before the sound had wholly subsided, Verlaine’s hand had found Gyre’s and was squeezing tight.

“It’ll be alright,” Gyre said, briefly tearing his eyes away from Verlaine to look up at the sky. “Farraih’s not the only one with allies to call in.”

A wheeze from Verlaine as he tried to laugh. “And do they have good medical aid, your allies?” He coughed again, the blood slowly beginning to collect into a puddle at his side, now, and his grip on Gyre’s fingers slackened ever so slightly.

Gyre held on all the tighter. “Of course we do. You doctor-types just flock to us.”

“I’m glad to bolster the ranks, then.”

They sat there in silence for a moment. Smoke billowed. The clocktower’s stones groaned. The pain in Gyre’s leg threatened to eclipse everything else.

“Thanks for coming back for me,” Gyre ground out. “Farraih really would have killed me if you hadn’t shown up.”

A wan smile. “Blame the damn Kirreth for constructing their weapons too well – the array I could get, but the weapon itself wouldn’t even char.”

Gyre nodded. “We’ll figure it out. We don’t have any Kirreth with the Raindrops, but perhaps we can get Avialle to help out.”

More coughing. “You think Taye and Avialle got out?”

“They must have, once you began exploding the building. Avialle strikes me as the type to have multiple escape routes planned, just in case.” And hopefully she would have the sense to let through his message to Shiver.

Another moment of silence, longer this time.

Verlaine squeezed his hand, and said nothing, even when Gyre squeezed back.

Hand in hand, they watched the empty skies.


	4. Chapter 4

_coda: dei imbriferi_

 

++An internal ACEC-issue datanet feed.

Video footage is of the expected quality, but with the distinct washed-out colors to it that tend to denote a hijacked signal.

In the foreground there is a newsbanner, tri-colored, capped off by the winged crest of Reille. From off-screen a newscaster is reporting, but their words are unintelligible and no subtitles are provided in the feed.

Attention is quickly drawn to the images in the background of the video feed, and above the ash-covered grass on which the camera is first focused, the ragged outline of a building quickly coalesces.

Raging fire appears to have all but consumed the building. Not much of it remains, and the ruined, blackened walls stand up like the jagged ribs of some marvelous beast brought low and gutted of all its useable parts.

The camera swerves slowly upwards and to the left, and a half-toppled clocktower swims into focus.

Something hits the camera lens just then and, after a moment of sitting there, pearls off until it disappears off-screen. Before long another smudge hits the lens. Another. Another.

Thick, heavy raindrops begin to visibly fall from the sky now, and as their number increases, the fires still smoldering inside the wrecked ruins begin to slowly go up in a billowing cloud of steam.

Before long the rain has become a true torrent of water, and as the drone of the off-screen newscaster finally subsides, the camera draws back to once more present a wide look at the burnt-out husk of a building.

A long, held view of the blackened ruins as what little remains of the facility is quickly obscured by the onslaught of rain.

And so ends the signal.++


End file.
